PlanetFargo

Building Games With the Wright Stuff

When GameSpy set out to provide readers like you with the best and most comprehensive coverage of the Game Developers Conference, we didn't know what we were getting into. Sometimes the talks that people give at these conventions are so vague and high-level that it's nearly impossible to write about. Such was the case with Will Wright's speech entitled "Dynamics for Designers." Will Wright, creator of SimCity, The Sims, and -- well -- just about SimAnythingelse, has a long and successful history of creating amazing games. Naturally, he packed an auditorium. You'd think he was presenting the cure for cancer. I take that back: hearing him talk about games was probably more exciting.

In one short hour the guy talked about everything from quantum mechanics to wave propagation to network theory, and somehow related it all to games. Thousands of geeks like us sat with our jaws hanging open, like we had just found the Monolith from 2001. "This is like CANDY for NERDS!" whispered Walla, our resident programming ace, tugging on my shoulder halfway through the presentation.

"Are you kidding?" I shouted, estactic. "It's like a Koala crapped a rainbow in my brain!"

Afterwards, we here at GameSpy couldn't figure out how we could spread the joy to our readers. But you can count on PlanetFargo to save the day. Here, then, is a kind of "Cliff's Notes" to Wright's speech, distilled into a series of short, monosyllabic grunts for your enjoyment. On with the show!

Dynamics for Designers: By Will Wright

Wright kicked the presentation off by taking a look at where games are today. As you can see from this diagram, it takes a lot of PowerPoint clip art to create a single game about a squished snowflake. Is there a better way?

Within a couple of minutes, we were looking at this slide. I kid you not, this is an actual slide from a presentation about game design. Look! It's some kind of black hole, and the equations for gravity! I think what Wright was saying is that, by understanding a few basic universal laws, you can explain a wide variety of physical phenomena. Also, you can build a time machine. I think.

This slide shows some little men with parachutes jumping into the squished snowflake. My notes are a little hazy, but I'm fairly certain that this was Will Wright's strategy for winning the Market Garden map on Battlefield 1942. Let's move on.

Kidding aside, here we get to the heart of the presentation. This slide is an outline of what Wright wanted to talk about. As you can see, he was going to touch on: System Dynamics, Cellular Automata, Chaos Theory, Network Theory, Agents, Networks, Layers, Propagation, Mapping Allocation Specialization and Nesting. At this point, he had about 45 minutes left, and over about 120 more slides to go, including one about his cat. Somehow he had a minute left at the end of the presentation. I'm not kidding.

Now, the point of this slide here is that a set of very simple rules can actually accurately model various phenomena. Such as this example, where a set of rules for cell propagation can accurate simulate, for instance, the crowds that gather around GameSpy's TV whenever someone starts playing the new Zelda game. Anyways, for this reason, Grand Theft Auto 3 is a cool game. If you can't see the connection, just give up now.